Robert Graves
sometime after I was a kid but before I was allegedly a man - isn't that funny? how does one know he is a man? - I stumbled upon Robert Graves. it was in my late teens, I think, maybe as early as my second year of Latin, that I read _I, Claudius_. my first Latin teacher had mentioned it, then my second Latin teacher mentioned it too, a year later. whoa! then I found it misfiled in the science fiction, and warily sat down to read it. it sucked me right in. I even read the sequel, _Claudius the God and his Wife, Messalina_. I was disappointed to learn that he hadn't written a sequel to that. I was so pleased with him as a novelist that I read _The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton_, then _King Jesus_. oh man! what a cool writer, I thought, and read his Autobiography, _Goodbye to All That_. it left me baffled. he was a poet? he only wrote novels to make money to support his poetry writing? how mysterious! (I hadn't discovered poetry yet. I knew and loved Bobbie Burns, but thought he was an anomaly.) oh, but then along came computers, and the unmanned exploration of space, and _Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams_. the world changed. my place in it changed. hunh! and Robert Graves was waiting for me again, with _The White Goddess_ and a formidable _Collected Poems_. oh my word! I read and I read and I read. (heh-heh-heh. I just looked at a bibliography of Robert Graves and discovered I had barely skimmed it in my reading. geez!) I fell under his spell and had to work my way out of it! damn, he's a good poet and writer and an interesting person! he died in 1985 after a busy and crammed ninety years thank you, Mr. Graves, for all that!
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